President Obama has become as infamous for what he fails to say as what he does. In his speeches he regularly, and conveniently, leaves out several important facts that muddy the water and would tell a different story than he wants told. We saw this pattern on display numerous times in his United Nations speech.
Here are six messy facts Obama failed to mention:
1. “This speaks to a central question of our global age: whether we will solve our problems together, in a spirit of mutual interests and mutual respect, or whether we descend into destructive rivalries of the past.”
This statement, which sounds a lot like presidential candidate Obama in 2008, has to be one of the most egregious in his UN speech. Remember how he was going to bring the country together in a post-partisan America? And yet no one has done more to push the country “into the destructive rivalries of the past.” It’s so bad that the media regularly use the adjective “toxic” when speaking of Barack Obama’s Washington. He often can’t get even one Republican to sign on to many of his proposals, and yet he suggests the community of nations can “solve our problems together.”
Well, maybe they can—as long as they don’t let him lead the effort.
2. “Because we address our differences in the open space of democracy—with respect for the rule of law;”
President “I have a pen and a phone” wants to lecture other countries about the rule of law? How about he tries it out here first.
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out last June: “The Supreme Court handed President Obama his 13th unanimous loss in two years on Thursday, and this one may be the most consequential. All nine Justices voted to overturn Mr. Obama’s non-recess recess appointments as an unconstitutional abuse of power.”
It takes some flagrant disregard for the rule of law to rack up 13 unanimous Supreme Court overturns, but our “constitutional scholar” in the White House is up to the task.
3. “On issue after issue, we cannot rely on a rule-book written for a different century.”
Would that “rule-book written for a different century” be the U.S. Constitution? Obama’s repeated disregard for the Constitution gave rise to the tea party movement. No president has done more to get Americans re-reading their Constitution—only that new-found interest is a result of trying to get the president to ”support and defend” it.
4. “But we can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every major power.”
Um, except that many of the major powers were too busy to join the president at the UN climate change conference on Tuesday. China, India and Russia—the first, third and fourth largest emitters of greenhouse gases—couldn’t find time to attend the conference, because they have no intention of playing his game.
Obama knows there is virtually no chance that these countries will sign on to anything that will hinder their economic development. But it’s not just these countries, he can’t even get the Democratically controlled U.S. Senate to approve a climate change treaty, which is why he recently announced he will try to negotiate an international agreement and then put all the participants on the honor system to comply.
5. “America is committed to a development agenda that eradicates extreme poverty by 2030.”
What utter nonsense. America is only “committed” to do what Obama wants for two more years, at which point a new president will make new commitments and, hopefully, cancel a lot of the old ones.
6. “We have waged a focused campaign against al Qaeda and its associated forces—taking out their leaders, and denying them the safe-havens they rely upon.”
George W. Bush couldn’t have said it better himself. A fact that Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown picked up on when she wrote of the president’s UN speech: “Obama didn’t just run against Bush’s foreign policy. He used to ridicule it. His rejection of the Bush worldview was so emphatic that it seemed to prompt the Nobel Peace Prize committee to give him the award just for getting elected. So much for all that.”
Now, people may agree or disagree with Obama’s military actions in Iraq and Syria, the point is that he has done yet another of his countless flip-flops with no mention that he was against an issue before he was for it.